Unified communications represents an important component of productivity in contemporary business culture, and its success from company to company can serve as a bellwether indicator of the company's overall management success. An essential feature behind unified communications is the ability to have a single way for reaching an employee. Thus, in a fully configured unified communications environment, all messages to an employee, regardless of the format of their origin (e.g., e-mail) will reach the employee at the earliest possible moment via another format (e.g., SMS) if necessary.
Unified communications may include the integration of real-time communication services (e.g., instant messaging) with non-real time communication services (e.g., SMS). Unified communications systems typically comprise not a single system but the integration of data from a potentially unlimited set of separate communications devices and systems.
As a further representative example, unified communications permits one party (e.g., a co-worker) to send a message on one medium and have it received by another party on another medium. This process effectively transfers an activity from one communications medium to another. For example, a message recipient could receive an e-mail message from a co-worker and access it through a mobile phone.
Presence information refers to the combination of the availability of a communication recipient to be able to receive a message and that person's willingness to speak. For example, if the message sender is online according to the presence information and currently accepts calls, the response can be sent immediately through text chat or video call. Otherwise, the communication may be sent as a non real-time message that can be accessed through a variety of media. Thus, presence information typically represents a status indicator that conveys ability and willingness of a potential communication partner.
Difficulties arise in producing a unified view of data, such as presence information, when a party's communication media are spread across multiple and/or overlapping systems. When a user's communications environment comprises multiple devices, not all of which are aware of the others, then the unity among the devices of the user's communications network is incomplete. So, for example, a party's laptop computer might not know about the same user's mobile telephone. Consequently, the mobile telephone is not joined into the same effective communications network as the other devices associated with the laptop computer, and a presence system cannot integrate the mobile phone into the unified communications environment.
No protocol presently exists that can be used to facilitate communications between a personal computer (PC), a Bluetooth device, a DECT device, and/or Wi-Fi device without translating from one set of supported commands to another. Consider the example of a PC application that communicates to a dongle through defined HID events, and the dongle communicates with a headset over Bluetooth. In this example, commands that are sent by the PC are terminated on the dongle. The dongle itself must determine whether the commands are required to enable dongle functionality or to enable headset functionality. If the command is for the headset, the dangle must maintain a copy of the state of the headset, in order to provide the appropriate Bluetooth command to the headset.
To make the situation even worse, if an additional feature is added to the headset and the PC, then intervening communications devices such as the dongle would also need to be updated in order to provide the functionality.
Unified communications has analogs in the home consumer market as well. A home user may want to watch a television program or surf the Internet uninterrupted, provided that an incoming message is from anyone other than a specific person. The home user may be able control devices (e.g., a wired telephone) associated with the home cable network to implement the desired message routing, but this home cable network has no control over devices outside its network (e.g., the same person's mobile telephone).
Attempts to solve this problem in the prior art have tended to be either overly complicated, overly expensive, or both. For example, one of the preferred solutions in the prior art has been to supply all networked devices with complete topology information. This approach provides a working solution, of sorts, but unfortunately requires a tremendous amount of administrative overhead. Not only must every device understand the protocols for every device that could theoretically be connected into the network, each device has to be routinely updated to accommodate protocol updates in all of those devices.
Other solutions have proven equally inadequate or inappropriate for providing a robust unified communications systems. A simple and robust solution is called for in order to make unified communications more robust and ubiquitous.